In Home Merchants & Appearance

[SekhmetM]

Can you please explain how this will cause problems with the server load?

One second, you're telling people that you can't create customization for them because it'd create server load (why you just can't do the same as you do with retainers is beyond me.)

Next second, you're telling us that you'll create them yourselves. How does that work in difference to server load? Surely it's still one character and so it'd have the same things.

And yet, as someone stated above me. How is this any different from having your retainers on the outside?

"Server load" as in more things for the server to load in relation to your estate.

The complexity of objects in and around an estate contributes to the graphics peformance of a player's console or computer. Consoles can only load so much so the developers are wary of implementing anything that might stress consoles in particular out.

[Sadana]

I would like an option to at least pick from a set of retainer appearances rather than being given something random.

And at least give us the option to not show hats. ; ;

[Nyalia]

I think the issue with having inside merchants that are customizable is the amount of data they'd have to store and load to generate the inside-house instances. Each of those housing NPC merchants are singular characters somewhere in their NPC database. They only have to tell the game "Load NPC N in location X,Y,Z facing direction D" just like any other piece of furniture. So, the game needs to store five numbers per furniture, each of which takes 2-4 bytes of space based on how granular the grid really is. The dye color and what the item is attached to probably take another byte or so, but let's round that up to 2 bytes in case there are more than 256 dye colors planned for. So, 12-22 bytes per item, 100-200 items (plus an additional byte for wallpaper/flooring/lights/etc, is about 1-4 kilobytes per house instance. This is probably totally off, but it should be in the right ballpark, which is a few K for the information of how to load the house.

Adding in customization for the NPCs, like, for instance, the ability to change their clothing, let's see how much that adds. 10 clothing items (5 if you only allow left side) which contain a dye color, item number, spiritbond value, condition, bind flag, glamour item number, and "crafted by" name link. Some of those could only be a byte, but let's say everything is 2 bytes (range: 0-65535) except the name link (let's give that 3 bytes so it can support up to 16m characters, or 4 bytes so it can support almost the entire population of the world (4.3 billion characters). So, let's call it ~15 bytes per clothing item. This adds up to ~150 bytes for all 10 items. You can have at most 4 of them in a house (on average), pushing this up to ~600 bytes. This means that adding customization to the NPCs increases the housing load from ~1-4K to ~1.3-4.6K. Thus, adding such customization increases the server space required to store housing info by ~15-30%. If you add in full character customization, it will be the same if not more, and both would likely double the space allocation for housing information. I don't know how compact character customization data is, but there are a bunch of factors all of which have a fairly small range of values, causing each to take between 1 and 16 bits.

Now, if you make clothing your NPCs work similarly to putting items in the armoire, this cuts the data down considerably. You don't have to store the condition, glamour item number, spiritbond value, or dye color. However, that limits customization and it can lead to issues when applied to FC housing, so let's move on to the next idea.

What if you make it so you have to buy "Merchant/Mender/Junkmonger Shirt/Pants/Bandana/Gloves/Boots," apply a glamour, dye the item (if desired), and then trade that item to the NPC permanently? And then cut down the information required even further by making the item irretrievable, and thus not care about ownership in FC halls. Now, you don't have to store the maker's mark, you don't have to store any binding information, you don't have to worry about items becoming lost, you don't have to worry about FC housing and item ownership, and so on. All you have to store for each item is the item number of the item it is glamoured to be and the dye color of the item. That's 4 bytes of information at worst, and only 5 items can be changed, so that's only 20 bytes of extra info per merchant. At worst, that's 80 bytes of extra info, compared to the ~2,000-4,000 bytes of info for the rest of the house. This would increase housing data load by only 2-4%.

Now, compare all of this with adding a new ward. We currently have 24 wards per server, each of which has a subdivision, for 48 total wards of 30 houses each. Adding one new ward (meaning, just to one city, and with no subdivision) would take that from 48 to 49 wards, adding 2% to the information the server needs to store for housing.

So, even with the most simple (datawise) of customization options for clothing those merchants, it would increase the server data load as much as adding a new ward of 30 houses. Of course, new wards can only be added 6 at a time now, but still - that amount of customization is more significant than it sounds.


However, none of this answers the questions people have had right above me: What about having retainers sell the goods inside the house? How much extra info would that take? 3-4 bytes for the character reference and 2 bits for which retainer plus 2 bits for which job the retainer is doing makes having 4x retainers on the property add ~16 bytes of data. That's an increase of about 0.4%. This cost was also already done with the outside of houses, by the by, so it would only be doubling that cost. Actually, now that I think about it, retainers on property do not update their appearance automatically. You have to manually tell them to update. This means they are not simply links to the retainers, their information is stored statically in the housing ward object. This means that the game has to store their gear info too, which is a lot of info as said above, and is no different than having fully customizable merchants. Unless they're storing the retainer's data like an NPC... given that there can only be a set number per ward, this is strictly limited, and they can allocate space in the NPC database for the retainers. But, if they can do that, then there's no additional cost in making fully customizable merchants... EXCEPT! You can have merchants in your personal rooms, and those are unbounded.

So, if they have to allow any customization for merchants inside houses to also apply to merchants inside personal rooms, then it makes total sense why they can't ever allow us to have fully customizable merchants or retainers inside houses. The fix? Separate out the merchant permits for personal rooms and for inside houses. Keep the personal room ones like they are, and let us have our fully customizable merchants in the houses themselves. Since there's a strict limit on the number of these in a given ward, they can be created as NPCs in the NPC database, and the only information that has to be stored is the NPC database reference number.



For reference, adding more variations on the NPCs would add no more data, at all, period. The varied NPCs would just be different NPCs in the NPC database, and add a few dozen more entries to it. That's why that solution is being considered by the devteam - it has no associated cost beyond the effort of creating the new NPCs. There are currently 30 NPCs in the database. Adding three new versions of each gender/race/job combo would involve creating 90 new NPCs - a negligible cost. Heck, they can host a character design contest if they're lazy and use the winners as the new merchants :P


/walloftext


TL;DR: Adding fully customizable NPCs or retainers to the inside of houses would require them to also be place-able in personal rooms, and thus require them to allocate an unbounded amount of extra space for housing data. Simply adding more static variations costs nothing, space-wise.

[ThePMSBeast]

If anything, could you please simply give us an FC-based option to make Household Retainers sell *exclusively* to FC members?
So we can set up a private shop for FC members to purchase goods at a premium value.
Or (possibly better yet) we could set a "FC Discount Rate" to where if an FC member buys our MB sale-items from an FC Retainer... they get an automatic discount (unlike regular buyers).

I REALLY support this Idea because i really see the new housing retainers useless. I was SO disappointed when i found out that FC retainers did not have an option to sell to FC only or to Public Only. Having that option would filter gil back into FC's and Players could make that Retainer a " FC " Retainer that they sell their goods at a discount for FC members.

[NyarukoW]

Why not assign our retainers to do double duty? They can be outside selling or indoor as a junkmoger, supplier, or mender?

[SendohJin]

Can you please explain how this will cause problems with the server load?

your Retainer appearance is already saved, they simply have to bring it up that one time and resave it one time when you place it. it's not really new.

it's also fairly easy for them to pre-make 100 different models and you choose 1-4, compared to letting each home owner pick different races, hairstyles, outfits, eye color, etc, etc. pre-made models is not customization.

[Sapphic]

Due to the additional server load this would cause, the development team considers the customization of housing merchants a difficult task to achieve. There has been some interest from players who would like their housing merchant to fit in with the style of the interior decoration and the development team is aware of this, and will be looking into adding multiple variations on the NPCs’ designs.

What about adding the option of 5-6 premade gear sets to chose from instead of full customisation?

[Cigaran]

While we're at it, how about we change the Name Plate from:
<Retainer>
<playerName>

to

<retainerName>
<Retainer>